High-intensity pulsed laser radiation is used to modify surfaces of materials and fabricate technologically desirable structures on a micrometer and sub-micrometer level. Besides their technological importance, such surface modifications are currently of substantial scientific interest. Although adequate, current processes involved in such radiation interactions are relatively complex and non-equilibrium due to high heating and cooling rates, large temperature gradients, and a variety of chemical and photochemical transformations. Such processes and their interplay are often not fully understood, providing a need for systematic studies of laser irradiation of materials as a function of a certain set of parameters.
Thus, improved, reliable, simple and low-cost techniques for fabrication of micro-structures and nano-structures having nano-tips of silicon and other semiconductor and metal materials are needed. Moreover, relatively large, high-density arrays of such nano-tips, are desirable in a number of electron field emission applications.